Games You Played Today: 13 Going On 30

It took me maybe 10 hours into the game, in a chapter where you’re given mostly new characters with default arts, to realise that anything you’ve glimmered can just be equipped on anybody with the right weapon.

I think it was a few hours after that I noticed the ‘parameter inheritance’ menu which basically lets you set a character onto another character to carry over stats.

The game doesn’t really explain any of this so I can see how the game could become insurmounably difficult without taking advantage of these systems. But also I assume they’ve changed them in some way that just makes the game way easier. For one, the tamagotchi style ‘Dig Dig Digger’ feature is built in, so you pretty much have an endless stream of items for free

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Woah that is some menu music.

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I love Path of Achra

Was so thoroughly invested in playing every day for a few months

A game with a fairly straightforward set of rules that just asks of you “figure out how to become ridiculous”, each session only lasting 15 to 20 minutes.

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i didn’t realize at first that the game was going to use that as my character’s “real” name, and so i named him Raidou Kuzunoha lol

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HOVERTANK 3D

SHORT VERSION: Sometimes fun but also sometimes frustratingly flawed with its primitive nature, Id’s first FPS showed the promise of better things to come. Tanks for that!

LONG VERSION: It’s Id’s first FPS! No textures! No strafing! No doors! But it can still be fun.

So in this one, you’re in the titular tank, and must hover around various levels trying to pick up all the Keen-ish humans dotted around the map. Once you’ve found them all (or if they’ve been killed either by you or an enemy), an exit appears and you have to race towards it before time runs out and the level gets nuked.

There are only three types of enemies… some type of flying squid that ignores you and just hunts down and kills humans (it only hurts you if you run into it), some kind of big demon dude that attacks with melee punches, and rival tanks that shoot projectiles.

Action is a little slow because, though you can move at quite a fast clip with a button press, your cannon needs time to recharge after every shot. You only get three hits before you die, though some levels have health pickups.

Despite the very limited mechanics, Id managed to make most of the 20 levels feel distinct, both through layout and use of enemies (some only have one type, some combine them). They also colour coded different areas to make navigation easier, since quite a few levels can feel a bit maze-y.

And I had a good time with it for the most part! It’s a simple action game, where you try to track down targets with the help of the radar while dealing with enemies, then make an exciting getaway before the level’s time limit runs out.

It made me think… Descent is kind of a spiritual successor? That’s also a FPS where you’re going around in a vehicle, rescue hostages, and every level ends with a timed escape sequence.

There are of course problems, though! Especially in the second half of the 20 levels.

The biggest issue is the enemy AI… they tend to just bunch up together as they all head straight for you to the best of their ability (often piling up against a corner), so you’ll face no enemies until you bump into a sludge of like 15 of them. It’s not so bad if you wait around a corner and take them out one by one as best you can (though that doesn’t work well if they are overlapping too much in which case you’re probably going to die if they’re tanks), but that wastes time and also isn’t exactly thrilling. Catacomb 3D improved on this by adding doors/destructible walls.

Overall though, the combat just isn’t too exciting (it’s basically Battlezone), which is a big knock against the game. Trying to find all the humans and escaping definitely helped add more excitement to it, putting pressure on you.

It can also feel a bit RNG in regards to saving humans, sometimes you just can’t get to them fast enough before they get killed off. That’s not a big deal though, you don’t get punished aside from losing money/score at the end of the level, and you’ll always have enough to repair your vehicle.

More of a problem is that you don’t know where the exit will spawn, so there is a chance you won’t make it there before time runs out if you’re too far away, or if you just get lost in a maze-y level… if you replay the level you’ll know where the exit will be, but it was still frustrating having to replay a whole level.

You only have one life, but can start at any level of the game so it’s no big deal. You start with zero points, so I guess it’s an issue if you want a high score, but I didn’t care about that.

This game also has some goofy personality that I really enjoyed. George Lucas gives you mission briefings, and most are anti-corporation, anti-fascist stuff like saving people working on clean oil before a corporation nukes them. Then there is really goofy stuff like a museum being bombed by dadaists as a “form of anti-expression.”

Oh, and the sound effects are great, it’s just the team at Id recording themselves making goofy noises.

So yeah! It’s fun enough, but definitely flawed and more of a historical piece than a good game. Definitely shows the potential the team over there would eventually realise.

NOTE: A lot of people on Backloggd are complaining about turn speed, there is a button that speeds you up (including turning) and is the only way I managed to pass some levels before the time limit expired.

People also complain about the framerate chugging in later levels, again I didn’t have too much of an issue with that… perhaps I had my DOSBox running at higher cycles.

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I played a few levels of Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun courtesy of PS+ and to my surprise I didn’t like it one bit. It all felt unengaging. Glad I didn’t actually shell out for it directly.

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Same here. Something about the field of view felt wrong like it was too wide or something. And the movement didn’t feel like Doom but the game kind of wanted to look like Doom so that felt wrong.

It looked cool in the trailers and I wanted to like it but couldn’t get through the first stage.

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Updated my dang drivers and now Shadow of the Tomb Raider sporadically crashes where it didn’t before. Just sudden 100% GPU usage it never recovers from.

Might just have to turn off ray traced shadows and forge ahead.

Anyway…game’s OK. I like the challenge tombs and crypts and whatnot more than the main game. Feels like they saw people respond positively to the changes in Rise of the Tomb Raider and quadrupled down, got greedy…game feels bloated and overburdened with way too many systems going on.

God I forgot the hell that is the eventual “underwater stealth section eluding a school of piranhas.” Not looking forward to doing that again.

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Beat Team Flare in Pokemon X. Captured Xerneas. Just one gym badge and the elite 4 left. I feel bad about Lysandre’s probable death.

This is almost certainly my final team

Also enjoying learning fashion through pokemon

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I also hated the way the chainsword worked, that like homing dash they structure it around. I just sorta want it to work like the chainsaw in Doom.

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The SaGa Frontier 2 remaster has a much easier final boss because there was no parameter inheritance in the original game + the remaster has a few extra scenarios to grind Ginny’s team up + there were no full healing save points in the last dungeon, you had to keep pushing this weak team forward (to an Egg death)

The remaster overcorrected a bit

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Ah, parameter inheritance seems like a pretty big change then, since you can just boost someone like +100 HP or so and double their best skill if you use the right characters.

I assumed it must have been in the original since there’s so many characters that are pretty much useless without it. Plus it seemed thematically relevant. Maybe they should have just restricted it to characters that have met the party members or something

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I guess at some point in the years since it releases they patched out the thing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider where, upon entering the hidden city, a little cutscene plays of Lara packing up all her non-bow weapons and changing into a villager tunic, and the opposite upon leaving.

Was it annoying? Sure, I guess. But taking it out entirely and letting you run around this isolated ancient city wearing whatever is kind of lame.

It only exacerbates the…is there a British version of “Ugly American”? But the thing where you can enable native languages in the options, so people in the villages speak Spanish or…Incan? And Lara replies entirely in English, doesn’t even try to meet them half way.

(I mean OK yes by default everyone speaks English, that’s why it’s optional, but it is really funny as a result)

(Also they patched out the whole changing thing but never bothered to adjust the subtitle timing for the Incan characters, so they talk forever but their subtitles lines will just zip through incredibly quickly, like less than a second)

Oh I also finally got to do the big DLC stuff that I never really bothered with on PS4. Like I guess they trickled out a number of challenge tombs, which are cool, but there’s a larger narrative tomb and it’s…fine. But it’s hilariously bolted on. You just walk up to some doors that didn’t exist prior to the mission and load screen into these temples.

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Wheel World

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Ok the bikefeel of Wheel World is the best fucking bike I’ve played in a videogame. I feel like I’m actually riding a bike. It’s really well done. Top notch.

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8 badges in Pokemon X. 17 hours in. I think I can hit the predicted 20 hour clear time. My pokemon are all about level 65 or higher and apparently the highest elite four pokemon level is 68. I should hit that just by battling Victory Road trainers and the first few elite four trainers and hopefully not have to attempt a second time. The leveling progression in this game seems really well calibrated.

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I’ve complained about this on here before but yeah it’s so stark how the DLC tombs in Shadow of the Tomb Raider are bolted on by comparison to the main game.

The best part of the tombs in the main game is how painstakingly situated and naturalised they are into the overworld, without loading screens, with one path going in and a unique path coming out somewhere else, perhaps emerging at another location.

Then as you say, the entrance to a DLC tomb is a risibly unassuming door that teleports you inside, and when you collect the goodie at the centre of the tomb the game just teleports you back to the overworld. I get that it’s an unreasonable amount of work, but it really feels like there was one person on the team who was stubborn about having the world be seamless, and that person wasn’t assigned to the DLC team (who probably just wanted to go home on time (I wonder how Eidos Montreal’s 4-day work week policy has held up (I see they have removed all reference to it on their careers page))).

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Crime Scene Cleaner: so you know Powerwash Simulator, right? Powerwash Simulator is not a game exactly, it’s an exercise in slowly dragging a mouse pointer over every surface of increasingly complex 3d objects. It’s a therapeutic way of listening to podcasts (as long as you don’t have an rsi). It also eventually develops a cute little “plot” but it’s never anything more than a fun goof.

So Crime Scene Cleaner is a game that asks, what if Powerwash Simulator had mechanics. What if you had to consider the objects populating an Unreal Engine-verisimilitudinous location to have physical reality that interacted (somewhat) with your attempts to clean said area. What if the area had secrets that you had to glean from environmental observation. What if, eventually, the cleaning became almost secondary to a light adventure puzzle solving game…

The game gives off an extremely unfavorable first impression due to its Polish developers having a tin ear for English and also importing a vaguely nasty, slightly conservative exploitative tone that’s sort of hard to pin down but feels a little like store brand S Craig Zahler. But if you can push past that I think it does credibly interesting things with the “3d space cleanup” microgenre.

After you complete the main game, which is already like 10-15 hours, it offers you Nightmare versions of all the regular levels, which are not an ultra-hard mode like a videogame reading of “nightmare” would suggest, but rather literal nightmare versions of the levels that haunt the protagonist in his sleep due to his guilt in helping cover up these terrible crimes. So they take the levels and heavily remix them to apply weird spatial logic and strange objectives. A couple of them are downright Mystlike. It really goes places and is a huge tone shift deep into the game on an hours-played level. I love this kind of unexpected risky genre-bending and it really elevated the game for me from a fun way to waste some time to something that actually engaged my brain. And it sort of redeems/lampshades the earlier proto-Deathwish tone by affirming that the protag is morally culpable for descending into the filth of the main levels, literally and metaphorically. I dunno. Even writing it in the half-sarcastic way I just did almost gives it too much credit, but hell. The fact that a powerwashing game could even make me write these kind of sentences makes it worth something in my book.

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TFW you’re playin’ Warframe an’ you get jumped by the Acolyte (semi-random miniboss) on Steel Path (kinda New Game+) whose chief special ability nullifies powers in a radius around them but you have the same power, Uno-reverso’ing them as they spawn in, so you blast them away, shattering their armor only for them to immediately teleport behind you you melee combo you into oblivion… at which point you leap clear of their melee attack and immediately counterattack with your own teleport attack, sending them straight back to whatever hell they crawled out of.

IFL Banshee. If you do pickup Warframe, she is (IMO) the most nuts-and-bolts Warframe in the game, with a kit that generally emphasizes using the mechanics of the game much more heavily than subverting them. Well, uh, aside from being the frame possessed of the ability to suppress the special, non-aura abilities of every other enemy in the game. But, y’know, it’s Warframe, they all have some bullshit at their disposal.

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oh my god this is exactly what I wanted from viscera cleanup detail

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